Identitarianism is not merely innovative in the ways it seeks to democratize performances of honour and offense. In many ways, this democratic tendency is the least innovative thing about it. To engage with its more innovative elements, it is necessary to move past the early Cold War (1945-74) and look at theories of self-fashioning that arose during its second half (1974-91). If not the foremost then certainly the first and most radical innovator in self-fashioning in this period was the Born Again Christian movement.
Just as in my work on post-Enlightenment epistemology, I believe that the Born Again movement constitutes a disruptive moment in our past that leads directly to some of the strangest and most disturbing elements of our present.
The Born Again movement, centred in the US, functioned, as I have said elsewhere, as a form of national reconciliation. It look elements of conservative evangelicalism, the ascendant religious movement within American conservatism and epitomized in the Southern Baptists and Non-Denominationalists and produced a true synthesis with the thinking of the smaller Jesus Freak movement that had emerged in the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s.
If there is a scene in cinema that is emblematic of this new kind of Christianity, it appears in the Robert Duvall film The Apostle in which the central character walks into a river and re-baptizes himself into the Christian sect of which he is the only member and sole minister. The Born Again movement fundamentally changed the nature of identity in the modern era by introducing an entangled practice of self-authorization both in adopting an identity and in that identity’s recognition.
As with pretty much all religious conversion before the 1970s, whether you were a member of NOI was something NOI determined. One needed to be accepted as a convert by a community; simply espousing the truth of NOI scripture or changing one’s surname to an Arabic one did not, in and of itself, function to make one an NOI member. Those changes were a means to an end: gaining the approval and acceptance of existing movement members to be recognized as one. In this way, the name-change and public attestations were simply rhetorical tools to achieve the goal of gaining the acceptance of the group. It was NOI that determined if one were a member of the “nation,” and the sumptuary and other laws were necessary but not sufficient conditions.
This, of course, followed a long tradition comprising Christian baptism, confirmation ceremonies, circumcision, veiling, etc. that permitted one to adopt and maintain an identity as a member of a religious group.
The Born Again movement radically changed that. It systematically rejected as untrustworthy all criteria for membership that lived in an inter-subjective, shared, social world. Church attendance, holy day observance, Healthcare providers suggest that discussing the problem with someone on line viagra may make you feel good. Medicines effectively treat this condition, buy levitra online check stock but do not get this wrong, veterinary chiropractic is not here to replace veterinary medicine. order tadalafil Improvement that a lifetime after environment your self a few goals. A research says that almost every second man faces erectile dysfunction which also means that the blood is not delivered viagra sans prescription canada to the desired parts of the body because of which you are not able to intimate with your mate. abstaining from sex outside marriage, catechism, confirmation, participating in the eucharist, mechanisms used by America’s various Christian denominations might just as easily be signs of apostasy as of faith. But more importantly, the double-confirmation of one’s Christianity was also rejected. To be a Christian, one had to be baptized. And once, baptized, one had to be recognized as Christian by other Christians, typically in the form of joining a congregation.
The Born Again movement changed the location of these things. Baptism ceased to be an objective physical event that took place in a shared, observable world and became something that happened internally inside the self. When one was “born again,” this was sometimes followed by a public baptism by other Born Again members but this was not baptism; in those cases as in the cases where there was no public baptism, one’s baptism was understood to have already taken place internally to one’s soul.
The ceremony changed from a necessary condition to become Christian and became an unnecessary post-facto formality. What mattered was that one’s soul had been changed through the establishment of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. True conversion entailed an unobservable phenomenon taking place entirely outside of the physical world.
Furthermore, because so many of the older and more mainstream denominations were opposed by the Born Again movement and vice versa, acceptance by a congregation was also severed from the adoption of a Christian identity. In this way, baptism moved from an objective and observable criterion to a dead letter; in this way, congregational membership i.e. recognition by other Christians as one of them, moved from a social and observable criterion into the same irrelevance.
Like NOI members, we can view Born Again Christians as proto-Identitarians.
Another important feature both groups possessed and that we see in Identitarians today is the belief identity confers monopolistic power to make knowledge about one’s group. White Devils could never learn black history because the ability to know the true history of the Moorish race inhered in the blood.
Similarly, Born Again Christians mobilized audacious anti-science rhetoric, turning mainline Christianity on its head in arguing that reason was not a tool for reaching God but an impediment, that historical “truths” like Young Earth Creationism could never be deduced through reason and evidence. Instead, God had to act upon one’s soul for one to achieve true knowledge. So effective, was this turn in overthrowing the epistemology of mainline Christianity that many cannot remember that Protestant Americans ever believed otherwise.
